Computer Game Teaches Kids How To Play Nice With Dogs

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Can kids learn to let sleeping dogs lie by playing a computer
game? A new study finds that the answer is "sort of."

A software program designed to teach kids how to interact safely
with dogs does teach valuable lessons, according to the research.
But the children have trouble translating their computer learning
into real-world situations with a live dog. The findings are
important because children make up the majority of the 5-million
dog-bite
victims in the United States each year, according to study
researcher David Schwebel.

"It's a much more major public health problem than I think most
people realize," Schwebel, a child psychologist at the University
of Alabama, Birmingham, told LiveScience. "Certainly
dogs are great companions, great pets, and they're safe and
fun most of the time. But they can be dangerous — they are
animals."

About 217 3- to 5-year-olds per 100,000 in the United States were
bit by a dog badly enough in 2009 to need medical attention,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Part
of the problem, Schwebel said, is that kids are active and
unpredictable, and can
stress out dogs. But another dog-bite risk is an issue of
child development. Before the age of 4 or so, children don't
understand that other people (and animals) have thoughts and
desires different from their own. So when a child sees a sleeping
dog and wants to pull its ears, that kid can't comprehend that
the dog might not be in the mood for ear-pulling. [ Infographic:
When Dogs Bite ]

The Blue Dog

To try to teach kids how to properly interact with their pets,
the nonprofit organization The Blue Dog Trust developed an
interactive computer game called "The Blue Dog." The game sets up
animated scenarios where kids can choose whether to play with a
dog that is napping, eating or otherwise indisposed. If the kids
make the unsafe choice — sneaking up on a dog during dinnertime,
for example — the dog will growl
and bark.

Schwebel and his colleagues wanted to find out if the program
really worked. They recruited 76 3- to 5-year-old kids from
Birmingham, Ala., and Guelph, Ontario, alerting parents to their
study via churches and schools. All of the children had pet dogs,
as the software is designed to teach kids how to play with their
own family pets.

Each kid came to the psychology lab and completed three
dog-related tasks. In the first, researchers showed the children
pictures of dogs in different situations and asked if the
child would go pet the dog in each. In the next tasks, the
researchers acted out make-believe scenes with the children using
a dollhouse and dolls. For example, they might tell the child
that it was playtime for the dog figurine (part of the doll set),
but the dog was feeling sick. The children were then asked to
play out what they think should happen next.

Finally, the kids went into a room with a real dog, where they
were rated on their safe and unsafe behaviors. (All the dogs were
trained therapy dogs.)

Those three tasks gave the researchers a score for how much each
child already knew about dog safety and how well they put their
knowledge into practice. After the tasks, the kids and their
parents went home with a copy of one of two education software
discs: "The Blue Dog" or "The Great Escape," a fire-safety
program. Both groups were told to use the software frequently.

Learning curve

After three weeks, the kids returned to the lab to complete the
same three dog-safety tasks again. The research turned up "mixed
news" for kids who played the dog-safety computer game, Schwebel
said.

"What we found is that children did learn. … They did better on
the pictures," he said. "They actually recognized when you should
pet a dog and when you should not pet a dog."

But when put into a room with a real dog, those lessons went out
the window. In fact, the researchers reported in December 2011 in
the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, all the kids got more bold
in interacting with the dog, regardless of which computer game
they'd played, possibly because nothing bad had happened the
first time they played with a dog in the psychology lab.

The Blue Dog Trust funded the research, but had no involvement
with the study or the reporting of the results.

Schwebel and his colleagues are now working on ways to improve
the software program to boost kids' street smarts around dogs.
It's not unusual for people, even adults, to understand
hypothetically what they should do in a situation but do the
opposite, he said.

"A lot of people know they shouldn't speed when they go down the
highway," he said. "But that doesn't mean that they follow the
speed limit."

"People assume their dogs are safe, and most dogs are safe most
of the time," Schwebel said. "But it's hard for people to admit
that their dog has the potential to bite, if provoked enough.
Every dog, if provoked enough, will bite."

Schwebel hopes that a greater awareness of the risks of mixing
dogs and children will help dogs as well as kids. "Dogs don't
like to be stressed by children," he said, adding that a dog that
bites may end up euthanized.